Whole Culinary Garden Workshops held each year in Byron Bay

Tue, 08/06/2010 – Jude Fanton
How to design, install and use a whole culinary garden.
Each week has theory, practicals in the extensive gardens, an exercise indoors and handouts. You’ll go home with seeds and other planting materials. We collect and prepare a vegetarian lunch together from the garden, with many raw foods and ferments. Here is a rough outline of topics we’ll cover, though the garden and your interests and questions will enrich this list!
You may take any one of the workshops as each is exclusive.
Week 1 – 19th June
Whole Garden Design – Creating a Garden of Eden right through to the Magic of Mushrooms
Topics: how to lay out the garden, considering sectors and zones, water, soil fertility, habitat, forest vs vegetable garden soils; vegetarian, vegan and raw food gardening
Garden practical: Tour of garden, observation of design, collection of mushrooms from under the forest,
Lunch: mushroom soup, roasted roots and salad with a ferments of home-made vinegar, starting cottage cheese.
Exercise: Design your place with zones, sectors, etc
Week 2 – 26th June
Rare Roots – Non-taxed underground low-input resources
Topics: Different species that suit this region under these categories: starchy (cassava, taro, sweet potato, yam), nutty (peanuts), spicey (ginger, tumeric, galangal, khaemferia, native ginger).
Garden practical: Digging roots and spices to eat. Where and how to plant.
Lunch: cassava, taro, sweet potato, yam, ginger, tumeric, galangal, khaemferia, native ginger, with fermented daikon skemono and pink ginger pickles
Exercise: Make labels for planting material to take home
Week 3 – 3rd July
Propagation – Eat roots, shoots, leaves, buds, flowers and seeds and multiply!
Topics: How to propagate from cuttings, tubers, rhizomes, slips, seeds
Garden practical: sowing seeds, taking cuttings of herbs, transplanting pineapples, etc.
Food: Curry of pulses from the garden (lima beans, pigeon peas, cowpeas), edible seeds from the garden (mustard, fennel, parsley, etc.); salad of shoots (fennel, parsley, etc.), buds and flowers (nasturtiums, mustard, salvias, etc)., with a ferment of leaves
Exercise: Clean and sort seeds, make and label packets to take home
Miss a Saturday – take a break
Week 4 – 17th July
Fruity Forest – choosing common and rare species that thrive in this climate, conservation of local varieties
Topics: the great diversity of species that will grow in this region; how to plant and maintain fruit and nut trees; conservation of local varieties; greater nutrition in local varieties
Garden practical: observations of fruity forest and of orchard, attaching new labels to trees, collecting fruits; perhaps moving logs; planting a couple of fruit trees in lower pond area – and lemon tree.
Lunch: green pawpaw salad, citrus dressing on green salad, bananas (+ fried green), etc. Frozen mango, rollinia; make fruit icecream, with a ferment of citrus drink
Week 5 – 24th July
Greening the Table – Comestible leaves
Topics: the immense diversity of species of greens that will grow here, including a dozen salads and nearly as many spinaches; edible weeds; edible tree leaves; principles of self-seeding and selection
Garden practical: sowing, thinning; collecting salads and spinaches for lunch
Lunch: greens lunch! Green soup, green drink with aloe vera from garden, green salad, spinach and eggs/dairy with a ferment of leaves